Marketing Automation Integrations

Marketing automation platform integrations can supercharge your martech stack if the integrations are done well.

Unfortunately, many companies don’t approach integration strategically. They make mistakes in their implementations and never achieve the full potential of marketing automation to power their organizational success.

Based in Chicago, marketing automation consultants at Walker Sands have done hundreds, maybe thousands, of integrations between various products and vendors with the marketing automation platforms we know best: Marketo, Pardot and Hubspot.

As part of our marketing automation consulting services, we actively support our global client base to help them optimize their integrations. Please get in touch if you need help with any of the following marketing automation system integrations:

CRM to Marketing Automation Platform Integration

We’re a B2B marketing agency, so our clients typically use Salesforce. Accordingly, we invested in our Salesforce expertise to ensure that we can support our marketing automation consulting firm’s clients. We can assist with Salesforce to Marketo integrations, Salesforce to Pardot integrations, and Salesforce to Hubspot integrations.

Not on Salesforce for your CRM? No problem. We’ve also worked on common marketing automation integrations with many other CRM platforms, such as NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics and SugarCRM. The fundamentals apply regardless of your CRM system.

Remember, this CRM integration is your most important integration bar none.

CRM to marketing automation platform is critical to martech success. Indeed, the most common defect in marketing automation deployments is the systems interconnections and workflows between Marketing and Sales.

If you buy Marketo, Pardot or Hubspot and don’t get the sales-to-marketing integration right, forget about ROI on your marketing automation platform.

When it’s done correctly, Sales will love the leads they are getting from Marketing and they will actively assist in data integrity and ensuring that reporting is accurate. Marketing will be more efficient and effective in setting up and running campaigns. Audiences get the right messages at the right time, and they engage accordingly.

But if the CRM system isn’t properly connected to the marketing automation system, it can be a disaster. Data is incorrect. Leads are improperly scored and routed. Prospects get the wrong messages, sometimes jeopardizing future revenue. We’ve seen it all — and we’ve fixed it all.

Prospect Survey and Customer Feedback Integrations

Surveys sent to prospects and customers are an important part of every marketer’s toolkit but integrating the survey tool with your marketing automation platform can be a challenge.

What’s critically important is that survey emails go out through your automation tool and that survey results are recorded in a way that you can use the data for lead scoring and downstream triggers for follow-up marketing via automation rules. For example, different marketing and services outreach workflows might be initiated depending on a customer’s response to a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. You’ll also want the ability to send surveys based on triggers as well.

Products like GetFeedback, Survicate, Decidedly, SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics and many others have built integrations to Marketo, Hubspot, Salesforce Pardot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud and other automation systems. The right survey tool for you depends on your specific needs and your specific marketing automation system.

Our Chicago-based marketing automation consultants can help you find the right customer survey tool for your organization, and we can assist with everything from configuration to execution.

Marketing Automation Webinar, Webcast and Online Event Integrations

If your marketing strategy taps into the power of events, you’ll want to make sure everything you do is nicely integrated with your marketing automation platform.

Your event workflow might include everything from event registration to check-ins to payment processing. You may be focused on webinars, user conferences, or other marketing or sales events. Regardless of your specifics, you want to capture all relevant data for your webinars and events. If you’re doing it right, invitations are automated and customized via rules-based drip campaigns. Plus, event attendance data should enable automatic triggers and initiate appropriate follow-up and sales activity.

Our Marketo consultants, Hubspot consultants and Pardot consultants work with top solutions in this space, such as Intercall, and can help with integration to other providers as well, such as ON24, INXPO, Cvent, Citrix GoToWebinar and Blackthorn. Odds are there’s a great solution for you that is already compatible with your marketing automation system.

Content Management System (CMS) Compatibility with Marketing Automation Systems

Most marketing automation platforms come with the ability to build landing page templates for conversion purposes related to lead gen and other business goals.

But that’s not a substitute for a decent website CMS, like WordPress, Drupal or Kentico. You can’t build a robust, high-functioning website with a marketing automation system. Nor can you run smart interactive campaigns with just a good CMS solution. In short, we’re all cursed to have to have both solutions, and the key is getting them to play nice together.

Sadly, integrating your CMS with Marketo, Hubspot or Pardot is far from easy. A best practice is usually to build landing pages in your CMS but use embedded forms from your marketing automation software. That ensures that lead activity is immediately captured in the marketing automation platform and routed into your nurture programs or directly to Sales, depending on your lead scoring logic.

It gets even more complicated if you decide you want to pre-fill forms with previously entered data when somebody returns to your site. It’s another layer on the integration effort.

Forms aside, Marketo, Hubspot and Pardot all have tracking code that should be built into your CMS templates to make sure tracking and analytics are working well. Failure to get it right can lead to either double-counting or activity that simply isn’t getting tracked.

CMS and marketing automation integration discussions tend to raise many other issues: For example, where should we store the artwork that is in both website pages and marketing automation emails? How can we use the information in the marketing automation system to improve the website? Then, of course, there’s the concept of an email CMS, such as Stencul. That’s a different kind of CMS to marketing automation system integration.

As you might be gathering, it’s complicated. Fortunately, we are here to help.

Video Marketing Solutions Compatible with Marketing Automation Software

If video marketing isn’t a big part of your marketing plan, you’re missing out on leads and leaving money on the table for your competitors.

According to Cisco, more than 80% of all Internet traffic will be video by 2021. That means B2B buyers in the future are going expect to be able to view B2B marketing videos when they come to check you out.

Fortunately, there are a number of great video marketing tools that integrate with the top marketing automation platforms. Worth checking out are Knovio, Vidyard, Engajer, Verb, Brightcove, Vidcaster, Wistia, uStuido, Rapt Media and Zentrick. We’re probably forgetting a few other rising stars in the world of video marketing.

We’ve got a great B2B video marketing agency team at Walker Sands that can help you create your video content. We can also help you figure with how to work video marketing into your B2B marketing automation strategy. But, most importantly, our engineers and certified experts can connect the dots between your video marketing solutions and your marketing automation software.

Custom Integrations to Marketing Automation Platforms

The top marketing automation platforms all provide access to developers for any customer integration work.

There’s good support for documentation for all the important marketing automation APIs, including Marketo REST API, Pardot API, and the Hubspot API.

But you’ll rarely need to do a custom integration to a marketing automation platform. If you think you do, we should chat.

Other Integrations

There are just a ton of software companies that have invested time and treasure to become compatible with the top marketing automation solutions.

You can see the full list of Pardot-compatible products here. Marketo also maintains a long list of its partners. Last but not least, Hubspot has its integrations library.

We’re familiar with many of these solutions and can recommend the right product for your needs, as well as assist with the integrations. In some cases, you can get some seriously awesome business results with the integrations. Ask our team, for example, about how they’ve connected Marketo and LinkedIn. Lead gen gold.

Don’t Get Fooled by “Marketing Automation Compatible” Apps

There’s integration and then there’s integration. It turns out many applications and software solutions say they are compatible with Marketo, Pardot, Hubspot and other marketing automation solutions, but that doesn’t mean the integration is seamless, easy to implement or effective. We’ve seen our clients get burned by this before — buying the wrong package for the job. “The sales rep said it was fully compatible” is a common refrain.

When it comes to integrations and compatibility, the devil is in the details. Field mapping sophistication, synchronization functionality and interconnections to templates and other assets vary wildly from solution to solution. Without doing your homework up front, you may find you still are cursed with manual processes and data that isn’t actionable when you need it to be.

Having worked on countless integrations across all the best marketing automation platforms, our consultants can likely steer you in the direction of a solution that is right for what you are trying to accomplish, and that won’t leave you regretting your purchase decisions.

If you’ve already bought something and are struggling to get the integration working, get in touch, as we’ve got the experience to help, and if there’s a workaround, we probably know it.

Examples of Bad Marketing Automation Integrations

Automation is supposed to free up time and let you focus on more important things. But poor integration into the marketing automation system often creates unnecessary work.

Here are some examples of marketing automation integration scenarios that don’t mesh with best practices:

“Hi Darla, I just got the opt-ins from the customer research survey. Can I send them your way so you can import them into our Pardot database?” No, no, no. Integrate the survey software with the marketing automation software and have the two systems share data back and forth seamlessly.
A client uses OptinMonster to improve conversion rates on a website, but never implemented the integration to Pardot. We lost valuable insights on their B2B buyers until we got the integration right.
We had another client in our Marketo marketing automation consulting group that used Oktopost for social media. Marketo and Oktopost can be integrated but the integration work was never done. As a result, there was no way to track a lead that came in via social back to the originating employee’s social profile. The fix was relatively quick once it got onto everyone’s radar.

Talk to our Marketing Automation Integration Specialists

The right integrations can turn your marketing automation system into a revenue-generating machine. To find out what you may be missing out on, talk to our experts to get some valuable perspective.